Greensource—was a Patagonia-like venture that
reached deep into the agricultural supply chain.

In 2005, Berry, then 50, sold Greensource and
returned with his wife to Cascade Head, on the
central Oregon coast, where they’d met at age

15. Two years earlier, they’d launched a nonproft
to create a 527-acre camp, farm, and wilderness
area there.

In Oregon, Berry reconnected with the fshing
peers of his youth. The government ofcial’s
warnings had come true: They were “living in the
red poverty zones of our coastline,” Berry says.

Much of the fsh caught domestically was being
shipped overseas, often for processing in Asia—
some of which was then sold back to the U.S.

“We were selling logs, not furniture,” says Berry,
describing local fsher folk’s failure to capture full
value for what they risked their lives to obtain.

In 2012, Berry co-founded the Portland-based
Fishpeople Seafood with Kipp Baratof, an executive versed in environmentalism and rural economic development. The company works with
independent fshers to source only sustainable
stock from the Arctic Circle to coastal California.

In Toledo, Oregon, Fishpeople built the frst of
what it expects will be several processing plants
where workers receive a living wage and health
insurance—virtually unheard of in the industry.

Fishpeople turns its catch into frozen soups,
meal kits, and fresh and frozen flets, which are
sold by Walmart, Whole Foods, Kroger, Costco,
Safeway, and other major groceries and mass
merchants. A customer can trace her dinner back
to the vessel in whose nets it met its destiny, thanks
to a code that appears on most Fishpeople packaging—a nod to consumers’ desire to know more
about how their food is sourced. “My goal is to
change our relationship with the sea,” says Berry.

The company took unspecifed millions frominvestors. “Seafood has a huge ticket to entry,” saysBerry. “It has high capital expenditures to get outon the ocean, and you have to preserve a productthat spoils very rapidly. I realized there is no wayI am going to bootstrap this.”Berry goes out on his suppliers’ boats as muchas possible, though these days he’s more apt totake photos than to cast nets. And while he ownshis own boat, he now prefers skin diving. He lovesto swim with salmon, a fsh he deeply admires.

“If you dropped most humans into the environment that a salmon survives, I don’t think they’d
make it,” Berry says. “Along with the fsher folk
themselves, the fsh are the heroes of our story.”
—LEIGH BUCHANAN

Teach a man
to fsh: The serial
founder who came
back to Oregon
to save the local
fshing industry

THE CULMINATION of Duncan Berry’s lifelong romance with the sea is available in more than 5,000 grocery stores around the country. Fishpeople Seafood, which employs close to 40 workers in-season, delivers for domestic consumptionsustainable seafood caught in American waters byindependent fsher folk. After 20 years of buildingfashion companies, Berry returned to the Oregoncoast where he was raised. There, he has rededi-cated his life to the people and wildlife that makeup “the last industry based on hunting and gath-ering,” he says. “We have two million years’ worthof that tradition in our bones.”Berry, the son of a novelist and a photographer,spent summers as a deckhand on his older broth-er’s salmon troller, Legacy I. By the time he was

16, he says, he was the youngest fshing boat
captain in the state, plying the rough chop of the
Columbia River. “It’s known as the graveyard of
the Pacifc,” says Berry. “It’s a rough piece of art.

It made me into a man early on.”Berry exulted in the purity and simplicity oflife on the water. “On shore, there are trafc jamsand bills to pay,” he says. Afoat, there are “tideand wind and weather patterns. Gear that getsfouled. Whales under your boat.” But one day in

1971, Legacy I took on board an Oregon Depart-ment of Fish and Wildlife ofcial, who predicteda bleak future. “He said, ‘In 10 years, you guys areall going to be gone,’ ” recalls Berry. “ ‘Fish stocksare dwindling. I’d fnd myself another job.’ ”Berry moved down to the Caribbean and spenta couple of years sailing, and then earned a degreein design and metalworking from Evergreen StateCollege in Olympia, Washington. He started threebusinesses in the fashion industry. The last—aSeattle-based organic cotton company calledWHAT DRIVES YOU

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